10/02/2013

When was the last time you pulled big bags of gold out of your company safe so you could count up all your retained business profit from last year?

Probably never, right? Why would you keep business profits in the form of gold bullion on your business property?

And even if last year's profit was in bullion someplace you probably wouldn't need to have it physically counted again to make sure none of it disappeared. The amount of your last year's profit is written as a number someplace that you can look up and see on a computer.

But what if there was only one computer in your business that could give you access to last year's business profit? And what if all of last year's profit would instantly and permanently disappear if that one computer was lost or stolen?

A silly question, right? You can easily access your businesses bank balances from almost any computer, tablet or smartphone in a secure manner.

But can you do the same thing for any or all of the rest of y0ur critical business data and applications?

I bet your IT guy wishes you could.

Securely Virtualizing Company Computers Saves You Money Many Ways

How is remotely accessing your firm's business banking information in the example above any different from remotely accessing any of your firm's other information on some sort of virtual computer or secure communications device.

It's really not. If you can move your firm's money from one bank account to another using a secure application on a smartphone you should trust that the same thing can be done with all of your firm's other critical business information and electronic assets.

For a primer on how virtualizing company computers can begin to save your company money, check out the following video produced by Microsoft.

If your company is suffering in the IT support arena then computer virtualization is a hot need that can save you hard cash money today and deliver soft savings from improved employee productivity in the near future.

Should Your Business Start a Virtualization Trial This Quarter?

Give us a call at 714-525-8100. In just a 45-minute phone call we can explore where your business is at with regard to IT resources as well as where you need to get to this year in order to achieve your technology delivered business goals.

We can also share with you the success stories our other customers have had when we've introduced them to trusted and vetted technology solution partners that we work with like VMware and similar other vendors.

For the last 23 years I’ve made it my business to explain to business customers why it was a good idea to evaluate other options if they were unhappy with their service from AT&T.

"Would you like to cut your phone bill in half?"

"Would you like to get your customer service from people who know your business?"

"What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you as an AT&T customer?"

These were the only three questions I would ever really have to ask a small or medium-sized business customer that was getting a phone bill directly from AT&T. The stories practically told themselves.

One question I never asked was, "Did you ever have any problems with the AT&T network?"

I never asked this because in 23 years in the business I've still not met anyone who could say anything bad about AT&T's network. It's great, it works and everyone agrees.

The perception was that only the AT&T enterprise direct customers got any sort of meaningful discounts or personal customer service. Small and medium-sized business customers just didn’t seem to get the same level of attention as their enterprise counterparts.

Can Businesses Get a "Generic Brand" of the AT&T Network? Yes!

One of the silent weapons in AT&T’s arsenal is a subsidiary called ACC Business. When ACC was first rolled out by AT&T, more than a decade ago, there were many fits and starts trying to sell a generic version of AT&T's network to small and medium-sized business customers.

Over the past several years though, ACC, through their independent distribution partners like BaldwinTel, have perfected the art of delivering near-perfect customer service at a price that comes close to the best in the marketplace for voice and data solutions as well as wide area network (WAN) services like MPLS and Ethernet.

What's ACC's secret for success? Simply put, it’s their people. Watch the video below to hear ACC's President John (J.D.) Baker explain how it's ACC's people that deliver exceptional AT&T network experiences to the small and medium-sized business customers of ACC Business channel partners like BaldwinTel.

The reason you may have not heard of the "generic version" of AT&T is that ACC Business does not have a direct sales force or the marketing budget of their parent company – they only market their services through authorized independent agent & channel partner agents like BaldwinTel.

Is it Time for Your Business to Move Back to the AT&T Network?

If you've had MPLS or Ethernet technical troubles with second-tier voice and data telecom providers you should take a look at moving back to the AT&T network.

If you've had trouble saving money with other tier-one telecom carriers on your voice, data and WAN (wide area network) services you should consider the tier-one benefits of the AT&T network when priced through the discount structures of ACC Business.

Give us a call at 714-525-8100 so we can share with you some of the success stories that other small and medium-sized business customers have had when going back to the AT&T network through ACC Business.

Back "in the day" when there was just one phone company, business owners only had two problems with their single phone bill:

1. Too much money charged for ...

2. Marginally useful phone service

Today any business owner can get super low rates for terrific phone or internet service but a new problem has developed:

1. No provider can service all locations

Today's business owners are faced with the old problem of a single phone & internet provider with high rates and marginal service OR ...

Great rates and terrific service but from dozens of different service providers who all bill separately and can't coordinate with each other.

Not surprisingly most business owners and managers choose to go with multiple providers and hope their internal admin staff can figure out how to manage multiple invoices from multiple vendors for the firm's multiple locations.

Can't This be Outsourced to an Expert at a Decent Price? Yes!

Yes Virginia, Santa Claus lives, he serves free lunch and says "You can have your cake and eat it too!" (In other words, broadband service aggregation and invoice management is possible at an affordable outsourced rate.)

Multi-location broadband aggregation started as soon as DSL service become a popular replacement in the late 1990's for dial-up internet for businesses.

Over time, as DSL has been replaced by 3G/4G/LTE/WiMax, local cable and fiber, experienced internet broadband aggregators that originally specialized in certain regional geographies or services have now grown to be able to handle any service provider anywhere in the USA and beyond.

Watch the following short video to see how one aggregator, Bandwave Systems does business.

Is Broadband Internet Aggregation Right for Your Business?

Probably ... if you hook up with the right aggregation management company. Some broadband aggregators specialize in cable companies while others specialize in wireless. Other aggregators specialize in matching vertical markets to required online business applications used in that vertical market.

Maybe you need a software solution that lets you aggregate your broadband invoices and management duties in-house. It might be worth taking a look at.

Give us a call at 714-525-8100 to start a conversations with us about which broadband internet aggregation solution is right for your business - if any.

Whenever I email my wife or kids I have to then send them a text/SMS (short message service) to tell them to read the email I just sent them.

At first this seemed like an odd requirement but that's because I sit at my computer all day. My wife and kids are constantly on the move so their lives are run by their ability to send and receive text messages from their phones or tablets.

Are your customers the same way? If so, can your customers text you as easily as they can call you?

Speaking of calling, my kids will not call their friends unless they text them first to get permission to call them.

Are your customers the same way? Is there an expectation that digital communications is preferred for initial contact over a voice phone call?

Depending on your industry you may find that your mobile customers (like my wife and kids) will only do business with firms that can communicate with them via text message.

So where do you start on a project to let your customers text you? Start with your toll free number. Isn't that the number you publish to let all your customers communicate with you in the first place?

Give your customers a single toll free number to call or text you for customer service so you can let them decide how they want to communicate with you.

Want to experience a working example? Send a test text with any message to 888-286-3000.

This service provider that you get the text back from is ATLC and their "toll free texting" service is called "Textify". The Textify service allows any business to receive text SMS messages from their customers using the same toll free 800 numbers that their customers already have.

To learn more about Textify watch the following short video.

Is a SMS/Toll Free Texting Solution Right for Your Business?

There's no doubt that your customers want to communicate with you THEIR way instead of just YOUR way.

To explore if Textify or any similar texting services from other vendors are right for your business, give us a call at 714-525-8100 to set up an exploratory review.

Well October has finally arrived and as the weather cools, the leaves turn and our kids bug us once again about what Halloween costume they should choose this year, hopefully you're able to enjoy a football game or some other family time instead of being worked to death like the poor IT department head you see to the right.

(Or is this one of your IT staffers working through their weekend at your direction?)

Whether you're the IT slave driver or IT slave in your company, you know that the job of keeping your firm's office technology functioning so that all employees are working 100% efficiently all the time requres an almost constant migration towards new, more efficient workplace office technology tools and ideas.

To help you sort the good ideas from the bad, we found the four following office technology ideas over the past month and thought you might benefit from knowing about them. Each idea is explained in a video. Check them out and leave comments below about what you think.

Overview - If customers or prospects Google you business name and then get your toll free number, can they just text you or do they have to call? Letting them text you can save your company money and make your customers and prospects happier. To see how the service works, send a text/SMS now to 888-286-3000.

Watch Video - This 90 second video shows the Textify service in action

Problem - To get low price and high bandwidth you've contracted with a different internet provide for each of your business locations and now managing all the vendors is getting overwhelming for you and your staff.

Solution - Let a single "broadband aggregator" manage all those vendors for you.

Overview - Bandwave Systems is one of several single point of contact "help desk" providers we work with that can manage over 60 broadband internet providers for you under a single invoice.

IDEA #3: Get the AT&T Network at a Lower Price with Better Customer Service

Problem - Many business customers have left the safety and quality of the AT&T network to save money or get more personalized customer service from poor quality providers

Solution - Get back to AT&T's exceptional network quality without high AT&T rates or impersonal AT&T customer service through AT&T subsidiary ACC Business.

Overview - One of AT&T's best kept secrets is that business customers can directly access their AT&T Global network through their ACC Business subsidiary at deep discounts but with highly personalized customer service through ACC's network of independent telecom agents and channel partners.

Watch Video - ACC President John (J.D.) Baker explains how ACC's people are the secret to small and medium-sized business customers accessing the AT&T network at super low prices but with high quality customer service.

Next Step?Read our full blog post on this topic at this link. Then call us at 714-525-8100. BaldwinTel is an authorized ACC Business channel partner. We'll help you compare the solution providers you're having difficulty with to ACC Business to see if now's the right time to switch back to the AT&T network.

IDEA #4: Virtualize Employee's Computers To Make Fixing Them Easier

Problem - Your IT staff can never get around to solving your firm's really big, strategic technology challenges because their days are filled with keeping individual computers working.

Solution - Securely "virtualize" your employee's computers and applications so they can safely access critical company data and information from anywhere on any secure device.

Overview - Just as you can access your firm's financial information and move money from a secure smartphone, you can access and manipulate any other bit of critical company data without having to be physically connected to one special computer device.

Watch Video - The following Microsoft produced video provides a simple primer on how a company can get started with a virtualization trial.

01/02/2013

"One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi..." nothing annoys your customers and employees more than waiting around after they hit the "enter key" on their computer or smartphone for your firm's computer applications to do what you said they would do (increase employee productivity, enhance customer service, reduce sales cycles, etc.)

Maybe your application is working right but your data network service provider is still trying to figure out how to best connect the application users and the application data. According to NTT America, for some ISPs (Internet service providers), 20 or more hops from one data network to another around the globe are required to make the right connects to make your application work.

Since every extra hop your data packets have to endure in their travel increases latency (one Mississippi, two Mississippi), to figure out how to increase network performance one has to understand how autonomous system numbers (ASNs) work and how jumping from one to another increases latency.

Just as a non-stop flight will get you from Los Angeles to New York faster than a flight that make multiple stops where you have to switch planes, so too does using a global single ASN network reduce the redundancy experienced by your data application users.

If you're deploying a data application globally across such continents as North America, Europe, Asia and Australia you'll want to consider a global data network service provider like NTT Communications.

NTT Communications fully controls the collection of routers that make up our Global Single ASN. We have independent links to the other leading networks around the World. We use our network to get you connected and to keep your data streaming.

Why is One Better?

According to NTT, of the 20,000 or so autonomous system numbers in use, NTT has ONE, where other ISPs have many. That means that North America, Europe, Asia and Australia all connect across a single backbone. NTT's customers experience stellar performance no matter where they are.

For some ISPs, data has to travel across multiple ASNs to arrive at its destination. Traveling across multiple ASNs can mean up to 20 hops. NTT claims they can do it in fewer than five. With strategically located exchange points around the world, you can get to ANY access point on NTT's global network in fewer than five hops. That's around the world (and back), smoothly, and with fewer delays.

NTT specializes in access and connectivity. For VoIP, streaming media, database application and backup, NTT claims you'll experience a significant reduction in latency. Their single global ASN is available to all NTT customers, globally. Wherever you are, your data travels seamlessly across our network and around the world.

07/05/2012

Finally. One of the biggest phone companies on the planet did something that will make the life of a Southern California business owner a little easier -- or did they?

Click here to read the Verizon Wireless press release that states that they are eliminating all their different "buckets of minutes" rate plans in favor of just letting all their customers talk and text all they like for one flat monthly price.

"All you can eat" talk and text. That's gotta be a good thing, right?

If all your employees do is talk and text a lot this new plan certainly is good. Except your employees don't just "talk and text". What they seem to be doing mostly these days is "apping" it up with every data drinking phone app they can figure our how to download onto their phones.

"Cha Ching" (That's the sound of you paying for your employees' mobile data usage through Verizon's new "shared data" pricing -- which is the other half of their new pricing package.)

Will Your Business Wireless Phone Bill Go Up or Down? Yes...

In effect, Verizon simply held up a mirror to its old pricing package and said, "This is the new package". Where they used to have unlimited data and metered voice and text, now they have metered data and unlimited voice and text.

To learn how this will affect business wireless phone bills I called two people I know that run business wireless expense monitoring and management companies, Moe Arnaiz from eMobus out of San Diego and Josh Lipton from Advantix out of Texas.

This story from California about a US service man getting a $16,098 phone bill from his wireless cell phone company got me thinking on three different levels.

First, I thought that could easily happen to my phone bill since I have two sons about the same age as the US soldier in the story who both use their cell phones for just about everything you can think of except talking.

Second, what was the guy really doing with his phone that jacked the bill up so high and do I or any of my employees do the same thing?

Third, are there any safety measures set up on my own business wireless cell phone accounts (I use Verizon for seven business cell phones) to prevent the same sort of "bill shock" from showing up in my mailbox next month.

How Much Data Does the Average Employee Use or Need Every Month?

Surprisingly little I think. I honestly had no idea (nor did I seem to think I needed to care) since I still had Verizon's "unlimited" data plan on most of my businesses smart phones.

After printing out the summary pages of my business cell phone bill for the last four months I discovered that for seven business cell phones the total was under five gigs of data per month total. The range was quite large though as my own personal data use was under 200 megs a month (just 20% of one gig) while my oldest employee (over 70 years old) used seven times what I used at 1.4 gigs.

(It took me a while to discover what "business use" a desk bound 70-year old employee would have for 1.4 gigs of data usage per month. We narrowed it down to either streaming Pandora radio for several hours per day and/or the Scrabble dictionary app.)

I was somewhat relieved to discover though that even the most data hungry power users I knew (all three of my teenage kids and even my brother-in-law who's always video-Skyping his kids from the road) used under 2 gigs a month each - a lot of data but certainly manageable - I think (right?)

How Do You Create a $16,098 Cell Phone Bill?

So now that I've got a handle on my own business cell phone and data usage I go back to thinking, "How'd this poor US serviceman jack up his cell phone bill to over $16,000?" Well if you read the story, it turns out the guy used 1.6 gigs of data in just six days while on leave visiting his parents.

Every week I work with all kinds of business owners, CIOs and IT directors in Southern California to help them solve some business communications problem that touches their business phone system.

While all my clients want to either lower their phone and data bills, get more productivity out of their employees or beat their competitors in the marketplace, none of them want to buy a new phone system to solve their communications problems. And who can blame them? For many of my clients, the phone system they have now has lasted 10 or more years and they'd keep it except they can't get replacement parts for it anymore.

Sooner or later all of our clients will need to buy a new phone system and to help them do it we are currently writing a "Business Phone Buyers Guide for CPAs".

(It's for CPAs because I currently have a CPA client that's paying me to help them choose between several IP-PBX hardware solutions and hosted VoIP solutions for their new phone system. After the first buyers guide is written we'll rewrite it for the unique needs of other business types.)

Your "Here's What Happened to Us" Comments are Invited for the Book!

Every good "How To Buy" book of any flavor needs customer anecdotes and lessons learned. If you've purchased a new business phone system for your business over the past several years and have some "lessons learned" that you'd like to contribute to the book we'd love to hear and print them. Please email them to Dan@BusinessPhoneNews.com.

If you've not purchased a phone system recently but think you will need to in the next year please also contact us and we'll share a copy of the book with you in e-book format. The book will be published by the end of July 2012.

About Us

We specialize in helping Southern California business customers in San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ontario and beyond. If we set you up for our free 45-minute consulting call (click here for details) we might be able to solve your problem for free!

For years the business phone companies in Southern California have been telling business owners and IT directors that using any sort of cable Internet solution in a business environment is a bad idea because cable does not have any quality of service ("QoS") and is an inherently "shared" resource meaning a business would never get the data throughput they were promised.

Well that argument is certainly still being waived around by the telcos but after experiencing the successful use of cable Internet in their homes, few business owners or IT directors have a problem with the idea of backing up the wide area date network for their business with a professionally aggregated mix of coax cable providers.

But since all the cable companies have different service areas across the country, most businesses are hesitant to try an aggregated cable backup solution because of the problem of having to do all the aggregation in-house and then keeping track of individual cable company invoices.

Fortunately there are cable aggregation companies available to businesses that want to try an aggregated cable solution to backup or augment their main MPLS wide area network or "WAN". Of all the cable aggregation companies to choose from, few have the "one stop shop" success that has been found by Bandwave Systems out of Philadelphia.

To learn just how a coax cable solution works when backing up or aggregating an MPLS network we recently interviewed Tom Azelby, Managing Director of Bandwave.

You can also listen now with your computer speakers by clicking the player below and then follow along by reading the transcript below.

Interview Audio

Click the player above to listen to the interview now.

Interview Transcript

Dan Baldwin: Today I'm speaking with Tom Azelby, the founder and managing partner of Bandwave Systems, a nationwide business broadband provider that integrates and aggregates all carriers and cable operators and technologies, DSL, T-1, cable, fiber, Ethernet, wireless and so on, so that businesses with multiple locations are provided a complete nationwide network solution with just a single point of contact. Tom, thanks for speaking with our audience today.

Tom Azelby: Thanks for having me, Dan.

DB: Tom, for years, IT directors have been led to believe that an MPLS network was the perfect solution to connect a nationwide multi-location business over a single wide area network, or WAN, but for multiple reasons, your company, Bandwave Systems has been brought in by MPLS carriers to augment and/or backup the MPLS solution they were selling a business.

TA: Well, I think one of the big reasons today is network redundancy, and coax cable is a diverse pathway to traditional Telecom infrastructure, so the Bandwave Cable -Connect product is a perfect fit for a redundant Internet connection.

The next reason Telecom Consultants and Carrier Sales Reps are coming to Bandwave is due to our experience. We've been in data aggregation since 2000. We were one of the first nationwide DSL aggregators. Today as a cable Internet provider or a cable aggregator, we have the experience, the relationships, and all the systems in place to provision and manage Nationwide Cable Internet Connections, Our main marketing message is one contract, one bill, one customer support, and we do that for Multi Site Enterprises using our partnership with all the cable providers Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, Cox, Brighhouse, RCN, Cablevision, Suddenlink, Mediacom (MSO’s).